Re: VGA cards
On Mon, Dec 14, 2009 at 20:56:42 -0600, Stan Hoeppner wrote:
> Sven Joachim put forth on 12/14/2009 6:54 AM:
> > That blob is taken out from the closed
> > source driver and probably undistributable, although Nvidia has promised
> > not to take legal action.
>
> Ahem, yeah, it's not a bright idea to sue your own customers, ya know,
> the ones buying your products (think SCO here) and generating your
> revenue. The day nVidia would file such a lawsuit, they'd instantly
> lose the vast majority of their Linux customers to AMD/ATI and Intel,
> essentially signaling they are voluntarily leaving the Linux GPU market.
>
> Ain't gonna happen.
I think your argument requires nVidia to remain profitable in the
business of selling hardware. Only then do they have something to lose
by suing customers or their competition (who can countersue based on
their own patent portfolio). Once upon a time you could have applied the
same reasoning to Silicon Graphics. Two bankruptcies and one takeover
later, the focus of their activities seems to have changed somewhat:
http://www.sgi.com/company_info/newsroom/press_releases/2006/october/ati.html
It seems to me that it is impossible to know who will be the owner of
the rights to the binary blob in the driver, say, ten years from now,
and how attractive the idea of suing a few Linux distributors for
copyright or patent infringement will be for them.
--
Regards, |
Florian |
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